Television advertising is a multibillion-dollar business in the United States and growing. Telephone directory, including “Yellow Pages” advertising, and other physical business directory advertising, is also a billion dollar business in the United States and has shown significant growth in past years.
Today, advertisers who wish to have their businesses listed in a telephone directory or need their advertisements played on television must find a way to submit the information to a cable company or to a cable television content provider. The submission process entails a delay in getting advertising content run or displayed. Also, once the listing or advertisement is submitted, that submission is run for a previously agreed upon period of time, such as for a 13 week television season or cycle or for some other period of time. In a telephone directory, the listing or advertisement remains unchanged until the next publication and release of the directory. Thus the advertiser is “stuck” with a particular listing or advertisement for the predetermined period of time, even if the needs of the advertiser have changed, or if, for example, new contact information of the advertiser should be listed or run.
At the same time, the television viewer has no means of viewing listings for advertising interactively. For example, if the television viewer wishes to view advertising content information of advertisers in a particular geographic area, there is no advertising search option to learn about the products through television advertising in real time.
There are systems that allow a user to surf the Internet via a cable television connection. Using such a system, the user can access product listings and advertiser listings. However, such systems do not allow advertisers to submit advertising content over the internet for storage in a format suitable for broadcasting to a cable network. That is, such systems allow a user to surf the Internet via cable television, but do not combine the power of cable broadcasting with Internet based advertising content submission to focus advertising content delivery.
Pay-per-view and emerging services such as television on demand allow a user to have a degree of control over cable television content, but do not allow advertisers to submit content over the Internet, nor do they allow a user to search for or select advertising information.